RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • Meta Is Blocking Links To ICE List on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads

    Source: Wired

    “Meta has started blocking its users from sharing links to ICE List, a website that has compiled the names of what it claims are Department of Homeland Security employees, a project the creators say is designed to hold those employees accountable. … As agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which are under DHS, have continued to terrorize immigrant communities and kill US citizens, activists have sought to track and record their activity online in a bid to hold them accountable. But as well as threatening to prosecute those they claim are ‘doxing’ ICE agents, the Trump administration has pressured tech companies to block any efforts at crowdsourcing the location and activities of those agents.” (01/27/26)

    https://archive.is/3xklj

  • Trinidadian Families File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Over Boat Strike by US Military

    Source: New York Times

    “Relatives of two Trinidadian men the U.S. military apparently [murdered] in a boat strike filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Tuesday, bringing the first legal challenge in an American court to President Trump’s policy of targeting vessels suspected of smuggling drugs at sea. The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Boston by the mother of one of the men, Chad Joseph, and the sister of the other, Rishi Samaroo. It said they vanished after telling their families they were about to take a boat home from Venezuela in mid-October. Mr. Trump announced on Oct. 14 that the military had attacked such a boat and [murdered] six people. … The lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, names the U.S. government as a defendant, rather than trying to hold any particular official accountable as an individual.” (01/27/26)

    https://archive.is/EWVg2

  • Deepfake porn apps downloaded 705 million times on Apple, Google

    Source: United Press International

    “The Apple and Google app stores have applications that generate images of women with their clothes removed with AI, a tech watchdog reported Tuesday. The Tech Transparency Project found 55 apps on Google Play and 47 on the Apple App Store that alter images of women to make them appear nude or partially nude. … These apps have been downloaded 705 million times and generated about $117 million in revenue, which Google and Apple receive a portion of. … Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok drew backlash earlier this month for following user prompts asking it to remove the clothes of children.” (01/27/26)

    https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/01/27/apple-google-nudify-deepfake-apps/4971769525010/


  • Minnesota Murders Shoot a Hole in the Overton Window

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “Even a few weeks ago, my position on something like the murder of Alex Pretti — sadly not an uncommon occurrence, as cops kill hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Americans per year, many of them unjustifiably — was well outside the Overton Window. … The shots that killed Alex Pretti shattered the window entirely. Not just because it was obviously cold-blooded murder, but because the few government and ‘law enforcement’ officials who tried to justify it were so clownishly dishonest and cartoonishly evil in their deliveries that no one with a shred of self-esteem could pretend to, and no one with an IQ over 40 could actually, believe them.” (01/27/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20288

  • Censorship and the Ratchet Effect: Threats to Free Speech Outlast Supposed Crises

    Source: The Daily Economy
    by Julian Adorney

    “Late last year, YouTube announced plans to reinstate accounts that had been banned at the behest of the Biden Administration for posting alleged COVID-19 misinformation. The announcement likely came as a relief to groups like the Children’s Health Defense Fund, a group associated with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and to Senator Ron Johnson; both of whom were punished by the social media giant for posting videos that ran contrary to the Biden administration’s official policy on the COVID-19 vaccine and on COVID-19 treatments. This is a good move. But we should remember, it wasn’t just YouTube that decided to punish speech disapproved by the prior administration.” (01/27/26)

    https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/censorship-and-the-ratchet-effect-threats-to-free-speech-outlast-supposed-crises/

  • Gun-Blaming in Minneapolis

    Source: The Dispatch
    by Kevin D Williamson

    “The Trump administration, being the Trump administration, immediately set about lying about what had happened, and the usual politics of gun rights were immediately flipped on their head, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insisting that [murder victim Alex] Pretti had been an armed rioter, which is — I do not suppose this even needs saying at this point — not true. Among others, the president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center affirmed: ‘I see nothing that Mr. Pretti did that was unlawful,’ at least with respect to his gun. But strangely, a great many people who sometimes call themselves libertarians began to insist that when an officer of the state gives you an order, your choices are: 1) comply meekly; 2) get gunned down. Ernest Hemingway had their number way back in 1940: ‘There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.'” (01/27/26)

    https://archive.is/zVxJV

  • The Constitution’s Check on Warmaking

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Michael D Ramsey

    “When President Trump authorized a strike to capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, without congressional approval, it was the latest manifestation of the increasingly common belief by presidents that they have broad unilateral authority when it comes to military operations. The Constitution’s original meaning, however, belies this notion. As I have developed at more length here, the Constitution’s ‘declare War’ clause allocates to Congress — and by implication denies to the president — the power to initiate hostile military action against foreign nations.” (01/27/26)

    https://lawliberty.org/the-constitutions-check-on-warmaking/

  • The campaign to crush free speech in Minnesota

    Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
    by Greg Lukianoff

    “Governments are always tempted to blame words for violence they can’t control. If “heated rhetoric” were enough, dissent would disappear whenever officials felt threatened — which, of course, would end up being all the time. The speech that federal officials have criticized in Minnesota seems like protected political dissent, not obstruction or conspiracy. That raises the discouraging possibility that the point of the Justice investigation isn’t to bring charges that will stick. Rather, it may be to use the threat of prosecution to chill speech. That’s not law enforcement. It’s ideology enforcement, backed by mob-like bully tactics.” (01/27/26)

    https://www.thefire.org/news/campaign-crush-free-speech-minnesota

  • Alex Pretti is the latest victim in the Trump administration’s drive for dominance

    Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
    by Lusi F Carrasco

    “Before Alex Pretti was shot and killed Saturday by federal forces, he was defending two women who were being violently shoved after challenging Border Patrol agents. The minute that agent started pushing those women with little provocation beyond whatever words were exchanged, Border Patrol relinquished control of the situation. The scrum that followed — as multiple agents pounded Pretti on the ground — was chaos. Chaos that eventually turned deadly, as agents saw that Pretti was carrying a gun. Much as they did after Good’s death, administration officials tried to control the narrative of what happened, blaming the victim.” (01/27/26)

    https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/alex-pretti-killing-border-patrol-minneapolis-trump-20260127.html

  • ICE Melt in Minnesota

    Source: Common Sense
    by Paul Jacob

    “Americans are strongly united against people being gunned down on our streets by federal agents. … Republicans at the White House, in Congress and across the country know the voters will crush them if this continues through the fall elections. Now if voters can only unite on reform beyond merely stopping the shooting.” (01/27/26)

    https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/01/27/ice-melt-in-minnesota/

  • International Tech’s Tug of War

    Source: Foundation for Economic Education
    by Daniel J Mitchell

    “For years, China’s control of the 5G and AI future seemed unstoppable. Backed by the Chinese state, Huawei — which is labeled a Chinese military company by the Department of Defense — embedded itself across global telecommunications networks, undercut competitors with pricing subsidized by China’s government, and expanded its footprint in everything from 5G infrastructure to enterprise networking equipment. Western governments warned about the security risks, but many markets ignored them. However, something unexpected is now happening, even inside China. Chinese consumers, once encouraged to buy Huawei products as a patriotic duty, are becoming increasingly skeptical of the company.” (01/27/26)

    https://fee.org/articles/international-techs-tug-of-war/

  • The Lies Get So Tedious

    Source: Caitlin Johnstone
    by Caitlin Johnstone

    “We live in a civilization that was built on lies, is made of lies, and is sustained by lies. As soon as the lies stop, the whole thing comes tumbling down.” (01/27/26)

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/01/27/the-lies-get-so-tedious/

  • How Canada Became an Enemy

    Source: Paul Krugman
    by Paul Krugman

    “Until Alex Pretti was murdered, the biggest story of the weekend was Donald Trump’s threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on Canada. Obviously Pretti and the backlash that followed were far more important than trade policy. But while the murder of Pretti and its consquences are the most important issue for America right now, we shouldn’t let the attack on Canada slide. We are, after all, talking about a destructive rupture with a neighbor that was, until Trump returned to power, one of our closest allies and remains our second most important trading partner. And Trump and his minions are lying about the reasons for that rupture.” (01/27/26)

    https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-canada-became-an-enemy

  • Where Is the Off-Ramp From All This State Violence?

    Source: Jacobin
    by Aziz Huq

    “It’s hard to think of a parallel effort in US history to build a domestic agency of violence specialists at the scale of ICE before now.” (01/27/26)

    https://jacobin.com/2026/01/state-violence-ice-trump-repression/

  • The Fraud Scandal Is A Bigger Problem Than Cops Can Fix

    Source: The Federalist Society
    by Chris Bray

    “Police are funded and staffed on the premise that they’re chasing small numbers of bad guys in a population of honest citizens. If that cultural premise fails, we don’t have the cops to fix it.” (02/27/26)

    https://thefederalist.com/2026/01/27/the-fraud-scandal-is-a-bigger-problem-than-cops-can-fix/

  • Follow the Money: Why Trump Pulled Back From Invading Greenland

    Source: Washington Monthly
    by Robert Shapiro

    “The main reason Donald Trump excluded a military option of taking over Greenland was not the frightful national security scenario that would follow a rupture of NATO. As destabilizing as that would be, the main reason Trump reversed course on using the military to seize Greenland was money. He slowly had to recognize that generations of transatlantic security integration have fostered profound economic and financial interdependence between the United States and Europe. I suspect economic advisors told the president that directing his generals to occupy Greenland would risk economic and financial meltdown in the U.S.” (01/27/26)

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/27/trump-greenland-invasion-economic-risk/

  • The hollow corporate response to the Minnesota killings

    Source: Popular Information
    by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims

    “Even after the fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good by an ICE agent on January 7, major corporations based in Minnesota stayed conspicuously silent. But when federal officers killed another Minnesotan, ICU nurse Alex Pretti, large companies apparently felt compelled to finally address the issue. On January 25, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce released a letter on behalf of more than 60 CEOs based in the state. It was signed by the leaders of 3M, Best Buy, General Mills, Land O’Lakes, Target, U.S. Bancorp, and many others. The 215-word letter, however, said very little.” (01/27/26)

    https://popular.info/p/the-hollow-corporate-response-to